Heisei Kamen Riders Vs. Showa Kamen Riders: Kamen Rider War

"The world of the Riders is kill or be killed!'
 
HEISEI KAMEN RIDER VS. SHOWA KAMEN RIDER: KAMEN RIDER WAR [FEATURING SUPER SENTAI]

 SYNOPSIS
 We begin in the middle of a battle between Riders. Fourze battles Skyrider, Kabuto battles Stronger, J battles Gaim. The Riders that fall turn to Lock Seeds (Gaim's collectible gimmick for this year) and are transported to a dark room where General Darkness, leader of the Badan Empire, gleefully admires that his plans are proceeding apace.

 Then we flash back: In Zawame City, they're used to cracks from another dimension appearing at random, but not quite like this--rather than portal to the fest of Helheim these are gateway to a mirror world, the world of Badan (yes, the Badan Empire from Birth of the 10th!!--er, sorta) Kazuraba Kota, also known as Kamen Rider Gaim, Zawame's protector, dives into one of these cracks and meets a young boy named Shu, who has a strange power (he can jump through space) and, while Shu has little memory of his life, he knows he has to use this power for some purpose. Before Gaim can get too deep into it, they're attacked by Badan's soldiers, who are soon driven off by a man named Takeshi Hongo . . .or, as he better known when he transforms . . .Kamen Rider 1. Rider-1 doesn't think much of Gaim (and Gaim thinks he's a bit of a jerk too) but there's no denying his power. Thanks to him, Gaim and Shu escape back to Zawame.

 But while they're battling in the Badan World, Badan's soldiers are also spilling into Zawane City, which brings out the other Armored Riders from Kamen Rider Gaim--Baron, Ryugen, and Shin Zangetsu. They do pretty well with the rank and file of Badan's soldiers and some of their cyborg generals, but they're soon outmatched by Badan's own Kamen Rider, the sinister Kamen Rider Fifteen. Fifteen, in addition to being a formidable opponent, has a power gimmick that makes him pretty formidable: With his Heisei Rider Lock Seed, he can don armour that gives him the power of all the Heisei Riders (and, it must be said, re-use some of the Legend Rider arms from the last Kamen Rider Gaim movie, though not as many as you'd think) Fifteen pretty much curb-stomps them.

 Until the Showa Riders (minus ZX) show up, that is. They declare that the Heisei Riders don't understand the Kamen Rider way (there's a lot of this, but it's pretty important to the plot, so it's not extraneous) They explain that Badan has inherited Shocker's ambition of dominating the world and is reaching out from their alternate world to claim ours.

 Needless to say, this is a lot of exposition, but thankfully, Gaim meets someone with a bit of experience in all this cross-dimensional stuff: Tuskasa Kadoya, better known as Kamen Rider Decade. As usual, on his heels is Narutaki (who is really small for some reason. Decade, being an ass, tries to poke him with a fork) But Narutaki's feeling unusually helpful this time, so he advises Decade and Gaim to gather they Heisei Riders to fight Badan, because the Showa Riders will not help them, and if Decade looks hard enough, he'll find out why.

 With that cryptic instruction it's time for the roundup. Shotaro Hidari (without his partner, Phillipe) is still in Futo, still working on (it must be said, pretty rubbish) cases, and Takumi Inui doesn't want to get involved, not even when Badan attacks him. He very nearly transforms to 555, but doesn't, because he's suffering a spot of post-traumatic stress, based on watching Kaxia killed by the Horse Oprhenoch (this is a bit of a retcon from the ending of 555, but necessary to the plot) and was a bit haunted by Kaixa's final words--he may not have liked him (God, who did?) but he was his comrade in arms and he misses him. This throughline will carry 555 through the rest of the movie.

 But before that can progress much further, Fifteen shows up and fights Decade to a standstill, and Inui leaves him to it. While all this is going on, Baron is helping Shotaro solve his cases (which all seem to involve missing pets) so we have a bit of comedy in-between all the blood and thunder.

 Inui makes his way to a cafe that soon becomes the site of a hostage situation, which is defused by an old man--a doctor--who treats the assailants wounds and defuses the situation, even dropping two of the SWAT guys who try to storm the cafe. Inui eventually learns this is Jin Keisuke, Kamen Rider X, and they have a good bit which further deals with Inui's PTSD and his belief that he didn't deserve to live as much as Kaixa did (Kaixa berated him for fighting with no purpose or ambition, which is consistent with 555's series) X advises him to watch the sea if he feels lost. It's a good bit, which is interrupted by the Badan, which forces X to transform and destroy them, and then, after Badan is destroyed, he challenges 555 to a fight, which 555 loses.

 Meanwhile, Decade has cracked the code: Shu is dead. His mother had to go to work when they were due to visit his favourite lighthouse and he decided to be a brat about it (texting her a pic with him holding a sign that said he hated her, which is . . .geez) and then got himself run over by a truck, which meant that his last act on Earth was being an utter jerk to his mother, which has haunted her ever since. Not least because of what it did to her father, who was so determined to bring Shu back that he fell in with Badan and became Kamen Rider Fifteen, and at last Badan's ambition is made clear: Badan is the army of the dead. Their plan, the Mega-Reversal Plan, is to upend the living world and resurrect the dead.

 Gaim tries to talk 15 down, but it doesn't go well. 15 absconds with Shu, and the proper Rider War phase of the movie begins. Black and Black RX (they're separate, somehow) fight W (or W as Kamen Rider Joker) Baron fights Amazon and Super-1, Fifteen trounces Gaim and Decade, and we're finally caught up with the battle that opened the movie, and the battle is joined by the Shadow Line (the villains from this year's Super Sentai, ToQger--"featuring" in this case means "shows up for a bit just before we forgot they were mentioned in the title) and Badan is within sight of achieving their Mega-Reversal Plan: with Shu at the heart of their machine, they will magnify his power to complete their resurrection.

 As the final battle shapes up, allies and enemies join in and compound the situation and we finally get why the Showa Riders aren't fond of the Heisei Riders: To the Showas, being a Kamen Rider means casting aside your attachments to the people you've sworn to protect, and fighting forever, apart from them. To the Heisei riders, the bonds that they form with people are the very reason why the fight and are a concrete representation of why they fight. In the final battle, that difference in philosophy forms the crux of the final confrontation . . .

  . . .because even if Badan is defeated, the battle between the Heisei Riders and the Showa Riders has to be settled.

 ANALYSIS
 [Yes, I will be SPOILING the two endings for the movie here. Be warned]

 Initially I had intended this to be the last review before Kamen Rider Drive, but I have so much to say about Gaim that I have to do it last and we're doing both back-to-back here before Drive premieres on Sunday. But it works very well, because the movie and Gaim are very much of a piece: Both are a re-examination of several Kamen Rider tropes in new ways and really rousing, effective entertainments aside.

 I should say first: Hard as it is to find a copy, please see this movie. While longtime fans will get a lot out of it, as an entry into the series, I would say there's so much cool stuff going on that the urge to find out what it's all about is so irresistible it's probably the ideal gateway drug. There's nothing that you need to know that's not in the movie already, but of course, longtime Kamen Rider fans will have a bit of a leg up. In an hour and change, you get a sense of the Showa Riders and what their era was all about, what the Heisei Riders era is all about (featuring some returns by their out of suit actors, up to and including Hiroshi Fujioka, Kamen Rider 1, himself) tons of references and callbacks for anoraks like me, amazing action (for all the putative Rider Wars we've had, this is easily the best one, featuring some inspired matchups and epic stunt and effects work) and a story that manages to make sense and not lose itself despite going off in several directions.

 It really shouldn't have worked, and yet, it does.

 The stuff with the Badan is great, and it's kind of amusing seeing a Showa villain group, with all the somewhat campy nonsense that entails showing up in a Heisei show and playing by their rules. It's not as big a leap as you'd think (Heisei shows have their own bits of silly excess, after all) and Badan's plan is somewhat sensible (even if it's probably a little too much like Amadum's plan from the final 2 Kamen Rider Wizard episodes) and functions as a nice reference to Shocker from the original Kamen Rider's theme song--the Badan are quite literally the army of Hell. The upgrade they gave the Generalissimo of Badan (who is now a burning skeletal dinosaur) is pretty awesome as are the new takes on ZX monsters like Tigeroid, who, it must be said, didn't really fare very well in their original outing.

 If the movie has a downside at all it's that "featuring Super Sentai" means just that--the ToQgers and one of the Kyoryugers show up, there's a clever bit where the ToQgers train mechs link up with the DenLiner (whose final attack summons ALL the Den-O trains) to form a special version of the robot, but in general they're a non-factor, and while they don't take away much from the proceedings, they are jerking the curtain for the big fight between the Heiseis and the Showas. The other downside is that Joe Odagiri wasn't Kamen Rider Kuuga so we could have had the first Showa Rider and the first Heisei Rider, but there was no way in hell that was ever gonna happen . . .

 And what a fight it is. The movie does a great job of building a philosophy for the conflict that make sense with the portrayals up to this point (If you remember from my Kamen Rider Stronger review, I mentioned that Tackle didn't get to be a Kamen Rider, because the way of Kamen Rider was endless battle and an utterly lonely, desolate path--the Rider fights for a better world, but he doesn't really belong in it)--the Showa Riders were, as a rule, generally closed off from the people they were protecting, whether by choice or circumstance and can come off as cold and unfriendly. That's not so much the case with the Heisei Riders, who usually have extended casts, are generally friendly sorts and unapologetically fight for a better tomorrow. It's a conflict that makes sense for both sides and rises above the usual comic book crossover "let's fight because of some contrived misunderstanding, then team up afterwards" cliche.

 Because they team up, beat Badan, and decide they need to reconcile this philosophical difference (not least because the Showas have a point--at one point one of the Heiseis nearly screws up everything) and the proper fight begins, and here's where our multiple endings come in. Before the movie opeed, Toei had a contest on the website where you could vote and decide whether the Showa Riders or the Heisei Riders would win the final battle. After a early surge for the Showas, the Heisei fans rallied, and thus, the official ending is that the Heisei Riders "win" (though that may not be the right term, as I hope you'll see)--As Kamen Rider 1 attacks Gaim, Gaim absorbs the hit to protect a single flower on the battleground. Rider-1 realises that the Heisei's determination to protect all life--even if it means they take the bullet to do it, is strength worth respecting and he stands down, conceding defeat.

 In the alternate ending, Gaim prepares his strongest attack to meet Kamen Rider-1, who waits for him. Gaim, upon understanding that Rider-1 will only attack him fairly, at the peak of his powers, realises that the Showas fight in a just fashion and concedes defeat. Then both movies end with the Showas entrusting the future to the Heiseis, who promise they'll do their best, and everyone shakes hands and rides off into the sunset. Except for Shin, who didn't have a motorcycle.

 For the Kamen Rider neophyte, this will hopefully be an introduction to a mind-blowing larger world that will take hold of them and never let go. For longtime fans, it's a celebration of the whole history of Kamen Rider in a way that looks back and looks forward, and no matter which point you jumped on this train at (whether from the very beginning, or at any stop along the way) there is something for you and some connection can be made.

 I quite recommend this for everyone.

 NEXT TIME
 "Looking back, that was when the gears were starting to turn. But . . .we didn't really realise anything at all. We didn't know that our fates were already written in stone. We just wanted the power to reach our dreams, we thought that would help us grow up.

 "That's what we all believed, at least.

 "But... you can't wish yourself into growing up. You grow up when you can't be a child anymore...

 "In the endless war that was yet to come... we would discover that for ourselves..."